Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Clarkes of Paternoster Row – Part 1

[1] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, London: C.H. Clarke and Co. 1852

by Robert Kirkpatrick

Two Controversies.

CHARLES HENRY CLARKE achieved a degree of fame as the first
publisher to issue Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in England in
April 1852. He went on to become a
prolific publisher of cheap popular literature, operating for many years out of
13 Paternoster Row.

His son, Charles
Henry Montague Clarke, was also in the publishing business, at one point also
claiming to be operating out of Paternoster Row. Both men were involved in controversies. The circumstances surrounding Clarke senior’s
publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were bitterly disputed; and Clarke junior was to become involved in a
series of bogus literary and artistic societies and dubious vanity publishing
schemes, and ended up in prison.

This is their story.

[2] American poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Part 1 — CHARLES HENRY CLARKE

Charles Henry Clarke was born in 1821 in Hammersmith,
London, the youngest son of James Clarke, one of Nelson’s captains at
Copenhagen in 1801. By the time of the
1841 census, when he was still living with his parents and older brother George
(a chemist) at Plantation Cottage, Chapel Street, Hammersmith, he was
describing himself as a publisher, although in truth he was a printer and
bookbinder — certainly, there is no record of anything he
may have published under his own name until 1852.

By 1851 Clarke had married (his wife, Julia
Maria, was born in Hammersmith in 1823) and living at 17 Sudely Street,
Islington, describing himself as a bookbinder and bookseller employing 45
people, and employing 15 year-old Emma South as a servant at home. His business premises were at 25 Bouverie
Street, and he was in partnership with Frederick Naylor Salisbury, a printer
originally from Suffolk (born Bury St. Edmunds, 1813), who also had premises in
Bouverie Street. Clarke had earlier worked
from 100 Chalton Street, Somers Town, and then at 54 Castle Street, Leicester
Square and 23 Primrose Hill, Fleet Street, and had been in partnership with
Rowland Bateman and Robert Hardwicke at 14 Clement’s Lane, Strand (dissolved in
June 1848), and then with William Bennett, at Bouverie Street and Primrose Hill
(dissolved in June 1852).

[3] Samuel Orchart Beeton

In early 1852 Clarke opened a publishing office at 148 Fleet
Street, from where, in April of that year, he issued the first UK edition of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At the same time, he and Salisbury were joined by Samuel Orchart Beeton,
then aged 21, and later in the year the firm of Clarke, Beeton & Co. was
established. Salisbury left the
partnership in November 1854, and in May 1855 the remaining partnership between
Clarke and Beeton was dissolved by mutual consent. [Source: London Gazette.]

[4] Henry Vizetelly

In February 1857, Beeton successfully sued Clarke over an
alleged unpaid debt of £175, based on two bills of exchange, drawn in June
1852, payable by Clarke to the publisher Henry Vizetelly, and endorsed by
Vizetelly to Beeton. Clarke argued that
the bills were in part-payment for Vizetelly’s interest in his Readable Books
series, and that Beeton had already paid Vizetelly out of the assets of his
partnership with Clarke. But the jury,
at the Court of Queen’s Bench, Westminster, found in Beeton’s favour. [Source: The Times]

Clarke went on to become a prolific publisher of cheap
popular literature. He used the imprints
of Charles Henry Clarke, Charles H. Clarke, and C.H. Clarke, and operated out
of several addresses during his career, including 148 Fleet Street, 7 Gough
Square, 9 Red Lion Court, 11 Red Lion Court, 13 Paternoster Row, 23A
Paternoster Row, 48 Paternoster Row, 3 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row, and 9 St.
Bride’s Street.

[5] Parlour Library

Amongst his works were
several series such as The Library of North American Romance (abridged versions
of American dime novels), The Standard Novel Library (which included novels by
William Stephens Hayward, Captain Mayne Reid and Percy B. St. John), Clarke’s
Popular Railway Reading (which included novels by C.H. Ross and Bracebridge
Hemyng), The Mayne Reid Library and Captain Mayne Reid’s Celebrated Novels, The
Dumas Historical Library, and The Parlour Library. He also published three books by his son,
Charles Henry Montague, and several by his daughter-in-law, Mrs Charles Clarke.

He may also have been behind The Boys’ Weekly: A First-class Magazine for the Boys of Great
Britain, launched in November 1867 by “the proprietors at 13 Paternoster Row”,
although this appears to have lasted for just one issue.

[6] Paternoster Row, early 19th century.

In the ten years after his split with Beeton he was not
always financially secure. In June 1862
he was registered bankrupt, owing just under £4,000 to John Maw Darton and
Frederick Hodge, publishers in Holborn Hill; and in August 1867 he was again bankrupted following a petition by
George Wood Bayldon and James Bayldon, of Calder-grove paper Mills in
Wakefield, and William Austin-Thompson, a paper merchant at 13 Paternoster
Row. A third bankruptcy occurred in
December 1869. [Sources: London Gazette]

These financial difficulties, which arose despite the
profits he made from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, may well have later encouraged Clarke
to provide moral, if not financial, support to struggling writers who were
forced to apply to the Royal Literary Fund. Amongst the authors for whom he wrote letters of support to accompany
their applications were William Stephens Hayward, Bracebridge Hemyng, Philip
Henry Hemyng and George Emmett.

Throughout the period when he was struggling with bankruptcy
Clarke was living at 22 Rosetta Villas, Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith. In 1861 his household comprised his wife, his
son Charles Henry Montague, then a banker’s clerk, his daughter Clara, and
Elizabeth Littlewood, a 59 year-old servant. Ten years later, still at the same address, his household comprised his
wife, a second son, Frank Alan, aged 8, and Ellen Smith, a 17 year-old servant,
suggesting at least of modicum of new financial stability.

His wife died in 1877, and he appears to have remarried in
1878, his wife, Sussanah, being 33 years his junior. At the time of the 1881 census, he and
Sussanah were lodgers at 132 Goldhawk Road with George Chilton a
greengrocer; in 1891 their address was
41 Gladesmore Road, Tottenham, where they were living alone, Clarke still
describing himself as a publisher, although the date of his last book in the
British Library Catalogue is 1886.

[7] Paternoster Row, late 19th century.

In 1901 he was living with his son in Essex. He died in April 1904, aged 83, with
obituaries appearing in newspapers as far afield as America and New Zealand.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

[8] Titlepage of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, London: C.H. Clarke and Co. 1852

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great
anti-slavery novel, was first published as a serial, over 40 weeks, in the
American abolitionist periodical The National Era, beginning on 5 June
1851. The first hardback edition,
published by John P. Jewett & Co. of Boston, appeared on 20 March
1862. Within a few weeks, the first
pirated edition appeared in England, published by Charles H. Clarke, although
the circumstances surrounding this, and subsequent events, are shrouded in
controversy.

The first account appears to have been written by Clarke
himself and published as an advertisement in The Times of 15 September 1852:

An early copy was sent from
America the latter end of last April to Mr Bogue, the publisher, and was
offered by him to Mr Gilpin, late of Bishopsgate street. Being declined by Mr Gilpin, Mr Bogue offered
it to Mr Henry Vizetelly; and by the latter gentleman it was eventually
purchased for us. Before printing it, however, as there was one night allowed
for decision, one volume was taken home to be read by Mr Henry Vizetelly, and
the other by Mr Salisbury, printer, of Bouverie Street…

The week following the book was produced, and an edition of 5,000 worked off. It made no stir until the middle of June, although we advertised it very extensively. From June it began to make way, and sold at the rate of 1,000 per week during July. In August the demand became very great, which went on increasing to the 20th. at which time it became perfectly overwhelming. We have now about 400 people employed in some way or other upon the book, and about 17 printing machines, besides hand-presses.

He went on to list the sales figures:

Illustrated
edition, 7s 6d, 5th thousand; original
edition, 2s 6d, 30th thousand; Routledge and Co., Railway edition, 96th thousand; Routledge & Co., People’s penny edition,
30,000 weekly. Thus about 150,000 copies
of this work are already in the hands of the public, while still the weekly
returns of sale show no decline. In
addition, we also beg to announce that 100,000 copies of the publishers’ trade
edition (price 6d, handsomely printed in pocket size, and stitched, or in six
penny numbers) are now in the hands of Messrs Piper, Brothers, & Co., for
immediate issue to wholesale dealers in periodicals. He finished by pointing
out that Harriet Beecher Stowe was to share in his success: Our editions are
the real “author’s editions”; we are in direct negotiation with Mrs Stowe, and
we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to
award that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in
America.

Clarke later expanded on his “negotiation” with Mrs Stowe in
The Literary World in December 1887:

… I was acquainted with the
late Mr S.O. Beeton, and in the autumn of [1852] I commissioned him to proceed
to America, and gave him carte blanche to make any arrangement he considered
desirable with Mrs Stowe. This resulted in his drawing on me in her favour two
sums of £250 each. These drafts I accepted and duly paid, and subsequently a
further draft for £250 in the same way.

He then said that Beeton also paid several other
American authors whose books Clarke had reprinted. (In fact, by the middle of 1853, Clarke had
reprinted a further 28 American novels.)

Interestingly, in a “Notice” preceding the title page of a
late 1852 edition, Clarke claimed to have given Stowe $2,500 as her part of the
profits. According to Claire Parfait,
however, in The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1852-2002 (2007), the
first English publisher to pay Beecher Stowe was Thomas Bosworth of 215 Regent
Street, who even announced that Stowe had a direct interest in his edition in
August 1852.

Finally, he wrote:

On Mr
Beeton’s return, late in the autumn of 1852, I took him into partnership, the
title of the firm being Clarke, Beeton and Co., but previous to this taking
place I printed all my works in Bouverie Street, and issued from my publishing
office in Fleet Street nearly three-quarters of a million copies of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin”.

A slightly different, and wildly inaccurate, account was
given by the publisher Sampson Low in The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
written by Charles Edward Stowe and published in 1889:

The
first edition printed in London was in April 1852, by Henry Vizetelly, in a
neat volume at ten and sixpence, of which he issued 7,000 copies. He received the first copy imported, through
a friend who had bought it in Boston the day the steamer sailed, for his own
reading. He gave it to Mr V., who took
it to the late Mr David Bogue, well-known for his general shrewdness and
enterprise. He had the book to read and
consider overnight, and in the morning returned it, declining to take it at the
very moderate price of five pounds.

Vizetelly at once put the volume into the hands of a friendly printer and brought it out on his own account, through the nominal agency of Clarke & Co. The 7,000 copies sold, other editions followed, and Mr Vizetelly disposed of his interest in the book to the printer and agent, who joined with Mr Beeton and at once began to issue monster editions…

Another somewhat different account was given by Clarke’s
son, Charles Henry Montague Clarke, in 1889 in The Literary World. According to Clarke jnr., an advance copy of
the book was submitted to nearly every publisher of note in London, but each in
turn either failed to appreciate its merits or was ignorant of the
non-existence of any copyright in England in books originally published in
America. The book ended up with the
publisher David Bogue, who in turn handed it on to Henry Vizetelly to dispose
of. Vizetelly showed it to Frederick
Salisbury, Charles Henry Clarke’s partner in Salisbury, Clarke & Co., in
Bouverie Street, asking £5 for it. Clarke bought it, and immediately printed off an edition bearing the imprint
C.H. Clarke & Co., 148 Fleet Street.

According to Clarke jnr., sales were slow for some months,
until, after large sums had been spent on advertising and the appearance of a
favourable review in The Times, the demand increased to thousands of copies
daily — edition succeeded edition as fast as they could be printed, and the
whole resources of a printing establishment employing over three hundred hands
failed to keep pace with the unprecedented demand. By Clarke jnr’s account, within twelve months
Charles H. Clarke had printed and sold 995,000 copies. (This is in contrast to a claim made by the
editor of The National Era in June 1853, who wrote that Clarke had, at that
time, issued six editions comprising an aggregate sale of 597,000 copies.)

Clarke jnr. further stated that Salisbury, Clarke & Co.
subsequently printed 40,000 copies for George Routledge, carrying his imprint,
and similarly large editions were printed for other publishers. In the autumn of 1852 Samuel Beeton was taken
into partnership by Clarke, and subsequent editions of the book carry the
imprint of Clarke, Beeton & Co. He
also repeated the earlier claim that Clarke was the first English publisher to
recognise the right of American authors to a share in the profits of their work
resulting from English reprints, and that he consequently gave Harriet Beecher
Stowe £750.

Later, Clarke jnr. expanded on this narrative, and, as is
often the case, the tale grew in the telling. In a letter published in Book Monthly in September 1906 (and subsequently reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly
on 23 March 1907), he stated that Vizetelly had acquired a two-volume copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the publisher David Bogue, who was opposed to issuing
reprints and did not think highly enough of the book to make an exception. He therefore passed it on to Vizetelly, who
in turn gave it to Clarke and Salisbury, then in partnership with each other,
warning them that a further copy was likely to arrive from America in the next
mail, and that they needed to make a decision by noon the next day, otherwise
Vizetelly would take it elsewhere. Clarke kept the first volume and split the other into two parts, giving
one to Salisbury and the other to James Greenwood, who was acting as Clarke’s
reader and literary adviser.

Having read their portions overnight, both Salisbury and
Greenwood recommended immediate publication. The decision to do this was made on 31 March 1852, and on 15 April the
first English edition, of 5,000 copies, priced at 2s 6d, was issued by Charles
H. Clarke & Co. Unfortunately, sales
were poor, until a lengthy review appeared in The Times in August, followed by
other favourable reviews elsewhere, and sales quickly escalated.

The book was then pirated by other publishers. Clarke refers to one particular edition which
included a preface written by Greenwood, which was protected by English
copyright (a protection not offered, of course, to the American text
itself). A great supply had been
distributed to the booksellers, but none could be legally sold till a
satisfactory agreement had been come to with Clarke. Clarke subsequently published a new edition
with chapter headings written by Greenwood, and when this was pirated Clarke
was able to invoke copyright law and acquire the entire print-run of the
pirated edition for less than the cost of paper and printing, simply inserting
a new title page and issuing it under his own imprint.

Finally, Clarke jnr. told that in the autumn of
1852

my
father sent his confidential clerk, Mr S.O. Beeton, to America to interview Mrs
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and hand her an honorarium of a thousand guineas in recognition of the
profit he had realised from her book. This is believed to be the first instance on record in which an English
publisher recognised any moral obligation to share his profits with the author
of a non-copyright reprint.

On Beeton’s return, he was taken into partnership, and the
firm of Clarke, Beeton & Co. was formed. Clarke then provided Routledge with 400,000 copies for a shilling
edition; 250,000 copies of a sixpenny
edition were printed for another publisher; and, according to Clarke jnr., within twelve months no less than a
million and a quarter copies of the book were produced by Clarke & Co.,
with a net profit of £18,000…

So, at the very least the honorarium paid to Beecher Stowe
had increased from £750 to a thousand guineas;
the number of copies printed and sold by Clarke had jumped from just
under one million to a million and a quarter; and Henry Vizetelly had virtually been written out of the story. Clarke was still peddling this truncated
version of events as late as 1921, in Chambers’s Journal, shortly before his
death.

Yet Vizetelly had already given his own, rather more
detailed account, initially in a letter to The Literary World in 1889 and later
in his autobiography, Glances Back Through Seventy Years, published in
1893. To begin with, he claimed that the
original imported copy had been sent to David Bogue from America by someone
working for Putnam & Co. in New York, who suggested that as the book was so
popular Bogue should reprint it and send him a trifle for his pains. Bogue, not being interested in publishing
reprints of American books, passed the book on to Vizetelly for inclusion in
his Readable Books, a series of cheap books Vizetelly was issuing from his
premises in Gough Square, Fleet Street.

Wary of issuing what was a two-volume book for a shilling, he suggested
entering into a partnership with Clarke and Salisbury, and they agreed to share
the costs of publishing an edition by an equal three-way split.

Vizetelly said he changed the book’s original
subtitle, Life Among the Lowly, to Negro Life in the Slave States of America,
and that a writer, then little-known, but who is now widely appreciated, both
as a journalist and essayist, wrote a preface to the work for the modest sum of
two guineas.

According to Vizetelly, it was not advertising and
favourable reviews which led to the book’s eventual success but the publication
of a shilling edition, which came about as the result of a cunning pre-emptive
strike on his part:

Although
well advertised, the volume — of which 2500 copies had been printed — proved a failure, but a rather singular circumstance contributed to its
eventual success. In the “Readable Book”
series I had reprinted Curtis’s “Nile Notes”, much to the annoyance of Mr
Richard Bentley, who had a half-guinea edition of the work. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” being advertised with
both my own and Clarke’s imprint, Mr Bentley, by way of retaliation against me,
I imagine, announced a shilling edition of the book. With the view of
checkmating him, I had a cover printed with “Price one shilling” on it, and got
Clarke to do up a copy of our edition in paper boards, trimming it as near to a
foolscap 8vo as could be managed. I then
sent the volume to Mr Bentley with my compliments, and a notification that the
accompanying shilling edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was on the eve of
publication. This induced Mr Bentley to
hold his hand, and as there was scarcely any sale for the book at half-a-crown
in cloth, it was determined to work off the remaining sheets in paper boards at
a shilling.

Note that Vizetelly claimed the first print run to have been
2,500 copies, compared with Charles Henry Clarke’s claim of 5,000 and Sampson
Low’s claim of 7,000.

According to Vizetelly he then went abroad for two or
three months, and on his return found that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a
best seller. He subsequently asked
Clarke for an account of the book’s sales, and was referred to Salisbury and
Beeton. But he was rebuffed:

These
gentlemen laughed at the idea of my asking for an account, told me that during
my absence abroad they had paid my clerk for the work I had done in connection
with the volume, and had also repaid to him the five pounds which had been forwarded
to Putnam’s young man, and that they declined to recognise me any further in
the matter.

Vizetelly immediately threatened legal action, giving them
until noon the following day. Just
before his deadline, Beeton called on him, offering at first £200 and then
£300.

I
replied that the extremist sum I had ever hoped to make out of my share of the
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” reprint was £500, and that after the dishonourable way in
which I had been treated, I was determined not to accept a penny less. Before the day expired I received the
acceptance of Clarke, Salisbury and Beeton for the sum in question, and my
connection with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” thereupon ceased.

Vizetelly then paints another contradictory picture of the relationship
between Clarke, Beeton and Beecher Stowe:

Beeton,
greatly dreading that the firm in which he had become partner might be
forestalled by some enterprising London publisher with regard to Mrs Stowe’s
next book, hastened to America and offered that lady electrotypes from the
engravings of an English illustrated edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, which he
and his partners had produced, for republication in the United States, hoping
by this economical sop to secure the early sheets of her new volume. The lady and her husband, however, laughed at
him in a polite way, and hinted that a money payment on account of the large
profits which had been made out of the English reprint of “Uncle Tom” would be
better appreciated.

Consequently, in the words of Vizetelly, Beeton gave Mrs Stowe
a few hundred pounds, in return for a promise of the early sheets for The Key
to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her follow-up.

Clarke, Salisbury and Beeton then printed a first English
edition of The Key of 50,000 copies, the bulk of which, by Vizetelly’s account,
was later pulped, leading to the speedy liquidation of the partnership. (This was not the case, as the partnership
remained string until it was dissolved in May 1855.)

Note that Vizetelly suggested that Beeton had become a
partner in Clarke’s firm before he travelled to America.

This account of Vizetelly’s involvement was also reprinted
in The New York Times in October 1901, and re-printed again via a letter to The
Publishers’ Weekly from his son, Frank H. Vizetelly, on 30 March 1907, in a
riposte to Charles Henry Montague Clarke’s account published a week earlier.

Yet another version of Beeton’s visit to America is found in
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes (2005). Initially, according to Hughes, Mrs Stowe
refused to see Beeton, but then relented:

The young man’s opening gambit, of presenting her with the electrotype plates from the luxury British edition, was sadly misjudged. Included among these was a cover illustration comprising a highly eroticized whipping scene, exactly the kind of thing that Mrs Stowe had taken pains to avoid. “There is not one scene of bodily torture described in the book — they are purposely omitted,” she explained reprovingly to him in a later letter dated 27 September 1852.

[quoted in Mr & Mrs Beeton by H. Montgomery Hyde, 1951]

The initial offer of the original plates from Clarke’s
illustrated edition was, of course, omitted from both his and his son’s
accounts, and was also omitted by Beeton when he briefly referred to his visit
to Mrs Stowe in his book The Dictionary of Universal Information (1858-62).

Kathryn Hughes further told that as Beeton was leaving
Mrs Stowe he bumped into the publisher Sampson Low, who had also gone to
America in order to persuade her to let him have the first option of publishing
her next book. (Some sources say that
Sampson Low spoke to Mrs Stowe before Beeton’s arrival.) In the end, Mrs Stowe agreed to furnish both
Beeton and Low with advance pages, in conjunction with a third publisher, Thomas
Bosworth. As Hughes pointed out, this
shared arrangement was lucky, as the book was a commercial failure and all
three firms lost money.

The only thing that can be said with any certainty about the
pirating of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Charles Henry Clarke in 1852 was that it
turned out to be a shrewd move, the book going on to become hugely successful,
not just for Clarke but for the many other English publishers who pirated it in
1852 and in subsequent years. (At least
13 English and Scottish publishers released editions in 1852, including J.
Cassell, H.G. Bohn, Gall & Inglis, George Vickers, Thomas Bosworth, Richard
Bentley, Milner & Sowerby and Ingram, Cooke & Co.)

What at first
glance was a simple and amicable agreement between Henry Vizetelly and Charles
Henry Clarke turned into a bitter dispute, with wide disparities in the several
accounts describing the book’s publication.

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Cartoonist, illustrator, storyteller, born in Nelson, B.C. in May 1950, has contributed to Chronicle, Weirdom, and Visions fanzines. John illustrated ‘Ronald and the Dragon’ by Lawrie Peters in 1975. Email: adcock34@gmail.com